San Lorenzo The Pearl Alexander Valley 2021
£60.95
The wine
Rich and expressive, with black plum, bramble fruit and sweet spice. Full-bodied and concentrated.
The Pearl comes from the oldest block on the San Lorenzo vineyard in Alexander Valley, the warmest of the Sonoma appellations, running north from Healdsburg along the Russian River. Old vines yield very little and concentrate a great deal, which is why a single block from them is bottled on its own rather than blended away into the estate wine.
The producer
San Lorenzo
View all San Lorenzo winesThe San Lorenzo vineyard was bought by Pete Seghesio's grandfather in 1896, with ten gold coins he had earned working as a cook for the gold mines. Old deeds suggest the vines were planted before 1892. The site sits next to Pete's home, which has a small cellar beneath it.
The Pearl is drawn from that century-old field blend: 69% Zinfandel, 15% Petite Sirah, 5% Carignan and 10% mixed reds including Grand Noir, Alicante, Negrette and Mataro. Field blends of this kind were the norm in nineteenth-century California, planted by Italian immigrants who saw no reason to separate varieties in the vineyard when they would be blended anyway, and they were picked and fermented together whatever each vine happened to be.
Almost all of them were grubbed up during and after Prohibition, so the survivors are genuinely irreplaceable: nobody would plant this mixture today, and nobody can recreate the vine age. Petite Sirah supplies colour and tannic backbone, Carignan acidity, and the odds and ends of Alicante and Negrette a savoury complexity that straight Zinfandel does not have on its own.
